Incarnating Image

This essay examines the significance of Frederic Leighton’s illustrations of George Eliot’s historical novel of Renaissance Florence, Romola (1862–1863). Leighton’s illustrations form a crucial part of Eliot’s vision of her heroine’s movement toward spiritual liberation. Eliot and Leighton together figure this evolution as a pilgrimage that takes us from the Old Testament to the Gospel of John, concluding with one of the most significant moments in the life of Christ: his encounter with the Woman at the Well. Leighton’s depictions of the heroine and Eliot’s narrative powerfully combine to show how Romola’s connection to sacrificial love is combined with increasing authority, as she becomes imagined as the force who unites both the prophetic Old Testament with the manifestations of the New. Romola thus uniquely underscores the place of a complex Victorian aesthetic and print culture within a genealogy of cultural renderings of female agency and mobility.